One of the most exciting things about going to London as a child was feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. We bought bags of food – I remember it as peas, but maybe it was corn – from the vendors and delighted in being festooned with flapping birds. Woody Allen had not yet branded them ‘rats with wings’. A Harris’s Hawk was introduced into the Square to scare off the pigeons in late 2002; in 2003 Ken Livingstone and the GLA made it illegal for anyone to feed the birds. The last time I went to London I watched peregrines on the Tate Modern tower.
Photo: Pigeons, Trafalgar Square, London, December 2000